There is something in the making... Todd Howard said in an interview that he and his team are working on something big. We can only speculate about what this is exactly but many people (including me ) are hoping for Fallout 4.

There were no hints about a new Fallout game on Gamescom 2014 or E3 2014. In an interview Josh Sawyer could imagine a massively multiplayer online version of Fallout as the next game. He works at Obsidian and developed Fallout New Vegas whereas Fallout 4 will be very likely developed by Bethesda which makes his statement more a wish than news.

The Fallout 4 FAQ from the Fallout Wikia is a good starting point to find a structured collection of facts and rumors. In addition to that CinemaBlend sums up the rumors that are currently around. Rumors are steadily growing: In 2012 somebody met a few Bethesda employees in Boston that were researching the city for a new game. A leaked document in 2013 reinforces this rumor and connects The Institute which is mentioned in Fallout 3 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

To be honest, I don't expect to hear anything about Fallout 4 before 2015. My first blog post about Fallout 4 rumors is almost two years old and I hope in the meantime Todd Howard and his team made some great progress on the game they are developing and of course I strongly hope that it's Fallout 4.

It's always funny what kind of crazy stuff is possible by just using bash and basic Unix tools.

Most websites hosting scientific publications offer citation information in BibTeX format. Unfortunately some of them think it would be extremely helpful to force you to download a single .bib file containing the requested citation data. Of course you can save the file, open it, select the contents, copy it and paste it into your desired bibliography file. But this is neither convenient nor efficient.

At first I tried to find a program that watches the contents of a folder on OS X. A post on StackOverflow suggested to take a look at the launchctl daemon. It's a nice program that can launch a script (or other program) when a file path has changed. Based on that I wrote a small bash script which reads the contents of a directory, copies the first file into the clipboard and deletes the file eventually. For an easy installation please follow the instructions I present on GitHub.

Now I can just save the file into this folder and the content is copied to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into my bibliography file.

I've found an interesting review of GTA V which doesn't celebrate the game as other reviews do. It is really worth reading because the author tries to maintain an objective view on the game and explains his opinion very precisely. He criticises the missions for being too linear in this huge open-world gameplay and underlines the balancing act the game does regarding the general mood of misanthropy and satire it conveys. The reviewer also thinks that the dialogues are often unnecessarily crammed with swearwords and explains this circumstance as follows:

"Sam Houser claimed that Rockstar North wanted to make a game about masculinity. What they've actually done is made a game about testosterone, which is a different thing."

Regardless of what positive or negative aspects some people might have found I'm really looking forward to the release of the PC version to review it myself. I hope Rockstar won't let us wait for eight months as it happened with GTA IV and it would be great if they come up with a nice Christmas surprise for us.

I'm looking forward to the next real Metal Gear Solid videogame since last year.

Konami now released a video with 11 minutes of "Metal Gear Solid - Ground Zeroes" gameplay. I could not believe that this was actual gameplay footage until the cutscene changed without any transition to the well-known third-person perspective the player is controlling Snake from.

The game is currently under development for PS3 and Xbox360 but could also be released for next-generation consoles such as PS4 and the next Xbox.

Usually fan or theme t-shirts are so geeky that they don't fit to the rest of an outfit, but I think the Vault-Boy hoodie with its plain grey colour is an exception. Furthermore the shipping costs of $11.13 (~8,60€) are quite reasonable.

To my mind this port turned out very well. The words are fetched from a server via AJAX to keep the fun up by prevent people from reading the words from the source code, I guess. Instead of unlocking and gaining access to the terminal you will receive a neat haiku afterwards. Nice!

What I wanted to say: If you refresh this page you should see the new header which is in fact recreated from the old one. This is a Retina-ready version based on the Clean-Retina theme. I like the way themes can be customised in WordPress. You just add a folder named "themeXYZ-child", put a style.css in it referencing the original one and you are good to go.

The menu bar previously had a solid background and was replaced by a semi-transparent image which makes the header less rigid.

Of course I could not resist to add my personal formula to the header. It represents definitely an awesome aim to strive for.

As you may have noticed in the previous post about my Eclipse Word-Wrap plug-in I changed the writing language. I made this choice due to the simple fact that it is possible to address a wider audience by writing in English. This makes sense especially with the idea in mind to write more often about programming and software development in general which may be also interesting for non German speaking readers.

I also see this as a challenge with the aim to improve my English on a regular basis. So please feel free to correct my spelling and grammar as often as possible. Write a comment or send me an email when you find any mistakes.

Under the hood of this blog things changed too. The software changed from Serendipity (s9y) to WordPress. It worked really well for almost five years, but WordPress definitely evolved since then and there are great features that made me change the software. I like the ease of embedding images without worrying about resizing and uploading them via FTP. The update mechanism is also a huge timesaver. In retrospective I should have listened to Gavin, who advised me to stick to WordPress before changing to Serendipity.

The old posts will remain in German as an archive and to be able to reference them in new posts if necessary. Maybe I will translate some of them when I think they might be interesting for many people. Another reason is of course the huge amount of 476 posts which I cannot simply delete.

The next step is to add more categories and recategorise older posts. I wasn't exactly happy with the old ones. So expect some changes around here in the next few weeks until everything is set up. The random quotations, the list of weblinks and a Twitter connection is still missing. The theme and overall design is also considered as work in progress.

One final hint: If you subscribed to the newsfeed of this blog please change the URL to: http://blog.cdhq.de/feed